Bob Dylan's Phenomenal Gospel

How fans of the '60s' emblem of rebellion took his Christian conversion

Just after his conversion to Christianity in 1979, Bob Dylan took his new songs of faith recorded on "Slow Train Coming" straight to San Francisco's Warfield Theater for a two-week engagement that didn't exactly win the local media over. After the opening night, Philip Elwood's article in the San Francisco Examiner--"Bob Dylan: His Born-Again Show's a Real Drag"--set the stage. "I thought that night was a pretty incomprehensible performance and senseless.Not the band, just the whole theme of the material," Elwood recalled.

Because of all of the hubbub surrounding Dylan's conversion, the other Bay Area newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, sent Susan Sward to cover the second concert as a news story. As Dylan fans stood in line outside the old vaudeville theater, Sward gauged the atmosphere before the show. What she discovered was a contingent of faithful fans who were willing to overlook Dylan's conversion just for the sheer pleasure of seeing him perform again. But this was before the show.

What Sward discovered during and after the show was a different matter. Several fans who ducked out before the end expressed their disappointment that Dylan hadn't played any of his classic songs from the sixties. Despite shouted requests from the audience, Dylan only played his new gospel songs, and that did not sit well with the crowd that night. One visitor from England complained that he had stood in line five hours to buy tickets only to come away with the feeling that he had been to church instead of a concert.

In the Chronicle's review of the second night--"Bob Dylan's God-Awful Gospel"--Joel Selvin wrote that although some catcalls and boos echoed throughout the theater, the audience mostly sat in "stunned silence." Sward claimed Dylan's songs were met with loud applause; Selvin described it as polite applause. Selvin concluded that Dylan's conversion to the "opium of the masses," as Karl Marx described religion, reflected the emptiness of the times and had stopped Dylan from asking the hard questions he had historically asked.

Among the musicians who shared the stage with Dylan during the Warfield run was keyboard player Spooner Oldham, who recalls that the first three nights were something of a mixed bag as far as the audience was concerned, with half the crowd applauding and the other half booing after each song. "After the first three nights the rebels either didn't come back or accepted it," Oldham said. "It calmed down, and everybody seemed to enjoy it more. It was sort of enjoyable even when it was weird, because it was challenging to face that kind of audience. You knew the music and message was nothing but good news, so you couldn't be bothered by that."

The musicians also couldn't be bothered by the placards and protest signs that greeted them as they pulled into the parking lot each day. One sign read "Jesus Loves Your Old Songs, Too," which pretty much summed up the message Larry Myers had tried to convey to Dylan; the singer had disregarded the Vineyard pastor's advice to mix in some old songs with the new. Throughout most Dylan concerts, fans typically shout out the names of the songs they want to hear, but during this series of concerts, the fans were more vocal than ever. And it seemed that most didn't even care which old songs he sang; instead of naming individual titles, they simply shouted that they wanted to hear the oldies.

"People were surprised by Bob's religious songs because Bob did not fit the stereotype of a Christian fundamentalist," said lead guitarist Fred Tackett. "Bob Dylan was a whole other world. He represented the intelligent, the literate. He was East Coast hip, but he was completely sincere in everything he sang and said."

And Dylan was not about to change his concert playlist to suit the crowd; he had never done that before, and he was not going to start now that he had a new message to convey. Even the concert promoter tried to get Dylan to play some oldies, to no avail. "Bill Graham came up and said, `Please, Bob, just sing one old song,'" bass player Tim Drummond recalls. "Dylan wouldn't. And then Bill said, `Oh, I don't care, I'm going to retire anyway.' It was a funny scene." But according to Drummond, the audience was one step short of throwing fruit at Dylan.

Not only was Dylan playing his new music from "Slow Train Coming," he also was playing songs from his forthcoming "Saved" album--songs that the audience had never heard, not even on the radio. For Peter Barsotti, a Graham employee, that was part of the appeal of the concerts. To get to hear Dylan live in concert was one thing, but to hear songs that no one anywhere had ever heard before was nothing short of sensational. In fact, the showstopper for Barsotti was a "Saved" tune called "Covenant Woman," with its high note creating a moment of "magic, complete magic."